Does anyone know what the inscription you find in Releeshahn (Myst V – End of Ages) means?It's a repeating sequence of ten letters but my basic D’ni is not enough to understand it; the only word I presume to recognize is do (‘how’)…

Here's the page from the old Guild of Linguists website (the new one doesn't have the photos anymore), you just need to ignore (or remove) the big popup in the middle saying that the site has expired.

For reference, here are the two comments below the picture:

Carolyn wrote:

I checked, and this text is seen on the floor of the courtyard in the good ending. (And it's cyclical; it's continuous text) I still have no idea what it means, though.

Carolyn wrote:

Transliteration: "bcheghdhopaz"Which would appear to be gibberish.Converting it as if it were using the alphabet found in Atrus's Prayer gives this: "bteghdhopchz", which is still gibberish.This could have just been random letters put there as a placeholder, except that the 'æ' character is there ('å' in Dnifont, which would presumably have been used), making this theory much less likely.Does anybody have any idea what this text is?

I know, it makes no sense and I’m not even sure the grammar (both D’ni and English) is correct, it’s just an example to illustrate the idea.Anyway I don’t believe plausible it was Cyan intention to insert an hidden and enigmatic sentence at the end of Myst V but it has been fun to try to find a meaning

paz is an element similar to the beginning of the verb pazgo which occurs in the (untranslated) sentence: met yishah kokenen kopazgo tenahsh mretson ahzmoreluh

The sentence can be partially interpret as: ‘this yishah was pazgo-ed in/with/by nash from the tson ahzmoreluh.’

This was published on the disk label for the Riven Soundtrack, and some time ago RAWA revealed that the text had been altered by the designer (presumably for artistic reasons) and he supplied us with the correct reading, and also seemed to suggest that the text had nothing to do with the game or the soundtrack.

Later I noticed that the word ahzmoreluh could be a D’ni transliteration of the name “Osmorella” from the game Cosmic Osmo, but I did not followed up on this. Recently I did some further ‘research’ into the Osmoian world, and (aside from learning more about Princess Osmorella) found out the there is a text in the game, on a computer screen and in a marquee apparently contolled by it, which says:

THIS PLANET WAS FUNDED IN PART BY A GRANT FROM THE OSMORELLA FOUNDATION

Since this is essentially the same syntax as in the disk text, I wonder if it is a sentence that RAWA just translated into D’ni as an ‘exercise’ and it ended up on the disk because the designer liked it (or most of it). If so, this means there are a few words in D’ni whose translation we can now supply:

yishah = ‘planet’pazgo = ‘(to) fund’nash = ‘part’tson = ‘foundation’.

If the verb pazgo means ‘to fund’ then perhaps paz might be a noun like ‘money’ or ‘wealth’, or a more basic verb like ‘prosper’ or ‘thrive’. It is possible that in the Releeshahn text some D’ni apostrophes have been left out by the artist; then we might restore the reading to something like:

b’cheg h’dho paz

Conceivably this could be some sort of brief maxim. If paz were ‘thrive’ then dho paz would be ‘how I thrive’. The word cheg might mean something like ‘balance’, since this was a key idea that Atrus arrived at in his plans for writing the Age of Releeshahn.

The letter h (if it represents h’ as a shortened form of he) is probably some preposition, a relatively infrequent one if we have not seen it before; perhaps ‘alongside’ since that would combine well with ‘balance’ as a verb.

paz is an element similar to the beginning of the verb pazgo which occurs in the (untranslated) sentence: met yishah kokenen kopazgo tenahsh mretson ahzmoreluh

The sentence can be partially interpret as: ‘this yishah was pazgo-ed in/with/by nash from the tson ahzmoreluh.’

This was published on the disk label for the Riven Soundtrack, and some time ago RAWA revealed that the text had been altered by the designer (presumably for artistic reasons) and he supplied us with the correct reading, and also seemed to suggest that the text had nothing to do with the game or the soundtrack.

Later I noticed that the word ahzmoreluh could be a D’ni transliteration of the name “Osmorella” from the game Cosmic Osmo, but I did not followed up on this. Recently I did some further ‘research’ into the Osmoian world, and (aside from learning more about Princess Osmorella) found out the there is a text in the game, on a computer screen and in a marquee apparently contolled by it, which says:

THIS PLANET WAS FUNDED IN PART BY A GRANT FROM THE OSMORELLA FOUNDATION

Since this is essentially the same syntax as in the disk text, I wonder if it is a sentence that RAWA just translated into D’ni as an ‘exercise’ and it ended up on the disk because the designer liked it (or most of it). If so, this means there are a few words in D’ni whose translation we can now supply:

yishah = ‘planet’pazgo = ‘(to) fund’nash = ‘part’tson = ‘foundation’.

Wow! My day is made.

Similar passive constructions in Aitrus's map (kokenen kosayen, kokenen kohooren) contain redundant subject marking on both the auxiliary ken and the main verb. While it's possible that kopazgo is an adjective, I agree that it's probably a past tense verb, in which case we have yet another formula for passive clauses. (This is why passives are my favorite part of D'ni!)

An alternative analysis of tenahsh is as the equivalent of the English "by a grant". nahsh would then be a mass noun meaning 'grant', or maybe even just 'money'.

The letter h does not seem to be able to come at the end of a word but it does come at the beginning in h'rot -- though we do not know what that means. Possibly dhopaz is one word -- 'civilization' (literally 'how' + 'prosper')

On the soundtrack disk text: I agree with Talashar that tenahsh could correspond syntactically with either of the phrases ‘in part’ or ‘by a grant’, since te has a general sense that includes ‘in/with/by’; but if the second of these were approximated by a mass noun, something like ‘with money’, then it would seem the more redundant of the two phrases, and thus the likelier to be left out of the translation. Note by the way that we might render ‘by a grant’ as terthtahgtahv.

In the passive construction kokenen kopazgo ‘(it) was funded’, that fact that we have kopazgo rather than kopazgoen suggests that only the verb ‘to be’ is marked for agreement with the subject of the passive verb. So what then would be the explanation of the second -en in a sentence like the following?

One possibility is that it marks agreement with the agent (the notional actor) of the verb kosayen, in this case Guild Master Garten. If so, it would suggest the possibility that you could mark the passive verb as having an agent such as ‘you’ or ‘us’ without needing an explicit agent object pronoun phrase:

Because that's where the texture begins and ends You have a point though, the text could start over at a different point, there is no visible separation in-game I think (althpugh it's a bit unlikely). Does the middle part of "bcheghdhopazbcheghdhopaz" make more sense?

The text that was published on the Riven Soundtrack disk one might call "non-definitive" but I would just call "garbled" It said:

met yishah kokene n koago tenahsh mretson ahmoreluh.

Years later RAWA provided the correct version of the text:

.met yishah kokenen kopazgo tenahsh mretson ahzmoreluh

A corrected text from RAWA is about as "definitive" as one ever gets in the world of D'ni linguistics, granted that it is not genuine D'ni but something RAWA has translated into D'ni as he understands it -- a purely "IC" distinction of course -- and given that we are just speculating as to what it means.

What the text says literally (using one interpretation of the untranslated morphemes) is:

"This - planet - it was - I funded - in part - from the foundation - Osmorella."

So I suppose the plausibility of this boils down to a fairly esoteric question:

Who typed the sentence into the computer in Cosmic Osmo and is it the same person who arranged for funds from the Osmorella Foundation to be used for the planet

If this is two words, e.g. dho paz (which feels more likely than dhop az), then there could be more of a difference between two of the possible readings, if paz were a verb that can have a dependent infinitive phrase: